“If the old Blackwater team were still together, I have high confidence that a multi-brigade-size unit of veteran American contractors or a multi-national force could be rapidly assembled and deployed to be that necessary ground combat team,” Prince wrote earlier this month in a column on his new company’s website.

“The longer ISIS festers, the more chances it has for recruitment and the danger of the eventual return of radical jihadists to their western homelands. If the Administration cannot rally the political nerve or funding to send adequate active duty ground forces to answer the call, let the private sector finish the job,” he concluded.

The “old Blackwater team” disbanded long ago — and now, with this ruling, is even more maligned. But is there any chance that the U.S. government will call on private security to help fight its battles abroad?

American security agencies had no qualms with giving hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to Blackwater in the wake of the 2007 debacle, and private security agencies have only rebranded and relaunched since then. In the wake of the 2007 shootings, Prince changed Blackwater’s name to ‘Xe Services’ in 2009. As Xe Services, the company received a contract worth around $100 million from the CIA. After Prince sold the company in 2010, investors changed the name to ACADEMI. As ACADEMI, the firm has continued to contract with the Department of Defense. And earlier this year, the firm merged with a competitor under the new name ‘Constellis Holdings.’

But the breakaway companies have tried to keep their distance from Blackwater’s image — even if their work is largely the same.

ACADEMI, for instance, has made a deliberate effort to distance themselves from Prince and Blackwater. One FAQ on its website bluntly poses the question, “Is ACADEMI associated with Erik Prince or the Former Blackwater?”

The answer begins with an unequivocal, “No,” and continues, “Erik Prince took both the Blackwater name and legacy with him when he sold the facility.”

The Blackwater name is no more, but where, exactly, has Prince taken his legacy? To the Frontier Services Group, a private equity group which offers security services along with “end-to-end expeditionary solutions” in the fields of construction, aviation, and even humanitarian efforts.

Does Prince’s op-ed mean he wants to get back into the fight on the government dime?

He doesn’t have to, according to Robert Young Pelton. “It doesn’t matter who has the contract, they’re all the same people,” Pelton told Foreign Policy’s Kate Brannen in July. “Constellis represents a clean slate until they f*** up and get thrown under the bus.”

Pelton would know. He was hired by Prince to help write his memoir. He then sued for not getting paid the amount the former Blackwater head agreed to pay him. His sense is that all of the new companies are just fronts with the same mission as Blackwater.

“The government has a bizarre love-hate relationship with these companies,” Brannen wrote, in summary of what Pelton told her. “On the one hand, they’re reliant on them to outsource political risk and on the other, eager to slap them in public whenever scandal happens.”

Risen reports that in the first days after the fall of Baghdad and continuing for over a year, American proconsul Paul Bremer, on his own, somehow ordered $12-$14 billion (note the uncertainty factor of two billion dollars, itself a crime) to be sent to Iraq in the airlift, and an additional $5 billion was sent by electronic transfer. Some sources put the total as high as $20 billion.

“We did not know that Bremer was flying in all that cash,” said the head of the Treasury Department team that worked on Iraq’s financial reconstruction after the invasion. “I can’t see a reason for it.”

The cash was literally delivered shrink-wrapped, on pallets, enormous bundles of Benjamins. Exactly what happened to that money after it arrived in Baghdad became one of the many unanswered questions from the chaotic days of the American occupation. We’ll never know.

Except maybe Bowen, who claims to have tracked $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion (note the uncertainty factor of $400,000 dollars) to a bunker in rural Lebanon for safe keeping. An informant said the bunker also may have held $200 million of Iraqi government gold. “I don’t know how the money got to Lebanon,” Bowen said. “Billions of dollars have been taken out of Iraq over the last ten years illegally. In this investigation, we thought we were on the track for some of that lost money. It’s disappointing to me personally that we were unable to close this case, for reasons beyond our control.”

The Bush administration never investigated how that huge amount of money disappeared, even after Bowen’s investigators found out about the bunker. The Obama administration did not pursue that lead, either. Bowen’s team briefed the CIA and the FBI on what they found, but no one took any action. Even the Iraqi government has not tried to retrieve the money, and has kept information about the Lebanese bunker secret. When Bowen and his staff tried to move the search into Lebanon themselves, he met with resistance from the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Bowen himself was not allowed to travel to Lebanon, and two of his investigators who did travel were denied permission from the embassy to see the bunker. Bowen’s staff members instead met with Lebanon’s prosecutor general, who initially agreed to cooperate on an investigation, but later decided against it. In the words of one who has spent perhaps too much time in government, Bowen summed it all up by saying “We struggled to gain timely support from the interagency as we pursued this case.”

Of all the missing money, by 2011 the Pentagon and the Iraqi government claim to have accounted for all but $6 billion of it, as if missing the target by six billion spaces is an OK result. And even that assumes one believes the Pentagon and Iraqi audit.

How did all that money go missing? That, at least, is something we know. U.S. officials claimed in the early days of the war that they didn’t have time or staff to keep strict financial controls. Millions of dollars were stuffed in gunnysacks and hauled on pickups to Iraqi agencies or contractors, officials have testified. House Government Reform Committee investigators charged in 2005 that U.S. officials “used virtually no financial controls to account for these enormous cash withdrawals once they arrived in Iraq, and there is evidence of substantial waste, fraud and abuse in the actual spending and disbursement of the Iraqi funds.” Meanwhile, Pentagon officials contended for years that they could account for the money if given enough time to track down the records.

But repeated attempts to find the documentation, or better yet the cash, were fruitless. An inspector general’s report into the missing money in Iraq painted a picture of Pentagon officials digging through boxes of hard copy records looking for missing paper copies of Excel spreadsheets, monthly reports and other paper documents that should have been kept detailing what the money was spent on and why those expenditures were necessary. Apparently, there are no electronic records to back up the spending. It. Just. Went. Away.

So where did all that money go? Here and there on the web you can find a conspiracy theory or two, but the obvious answer is usually the correct one. There are no doubt Dubai-based bank accounts of current and former Iraqi government officials swollen with cash, perhaps some accounts of American contractors and various U.S. officials as well. As for that bunker in Lebanon, well, your typical third world crew knows that you can only trust banks so far, and everyone needs a stash in case they have to bug out in a hurry and lay low while international terrorists hunt for you. Perhaps following a few more battlefield successes for ISIS inside Iraq?

By: Peter Van Buren writes about current events at blog. His book,Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, is available now from Amazon.